Last week, I participated in a Cato Institute an online event on “Trump v. Barbara: Birthright Citizenship at the Supreme Court.” The other participants were prominent immigration law scholar Prof. Gabriel Chin (UC Irvine) and leading legal historian Paul Finkelman (Univ. of Toledo). Dan Greenberg of the Cato Institute moderated. I have embedded the video of the event below:
Part of my presentation for the online event was based on my recent article in Lawfare, where I explained why all the Trump Administration’s rationales for denying birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants would, if applied consistently, also have had the effect of denying it to large numbers of freed slaves and their children and other Black Americans, thereby undermining the central objective of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This issue was raised by Justice Amy Coney Barrett in the Supreme Court oral argument last month.
I also touched on my Volokh Conspiracy blog post where I explained why, although I believe birthright citizenship is superior to currently available alternatives, it is actually a “second-best” policy, not the optimal way to handle issues of migration and citizenship.
